ELECTORAL MARKETS, PARTY STRATEGIES AND PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION: A REJOINDER TO MARKUS KREUZER’S ARTICLE
Carles Boix (*)
(October 16, 2009)
Abstract. Following Kreuzer’s (2009) methodological call to engage in historical analysis to corroborate the reach of our theoretical constructs, I look in detail at the goals and strategies of all the main political parties involved in the process of electoral reform across advanced democracies at the turn of the century. My examination shows that the strategic model I developed in Boix (1999), here refined to take into account the electoral and institutional settings in which policy-making took place, matches very well the country-by-country episodes of electoral reform (or non-reform) during the historical period under consideration.
(*) Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton University. I thank Alberto Penadés, Markus Kreuzer and Peter Swenson for the conversations, maintained before I wrote this article, on the question of electoral reform and institutional change in advanced democracies. I am very grateful to Mehvesh Mumtaz Ahmed and Waqas Jafri for their research assistance. E-mail:
[email protected].
After reviewing the existing research on the choice of electoral rules in advanced democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, Markus Kreuzer draws two main conclusions in “Historical Knowledge and Quantitative Analysis: The Case of the Origins of Proportional Representation.” On the one hand, he shows that the theory I advance in Boix (1999) is confirmed by a standard cross-country statistical test (even after correcting for measurement error and subjecting it to several robustness checks) and that it indeed outperforms all other available explanations. Yet, on the other hand, he cautions that several cases or episodes of electoral reform do not fit the strategic theory I proposed and suggests that we amend it by adding “alternative causal mechanisms for the adoption of PR” such as “short-term political engineering” and the accommodation of “minority representation” (p. 37). Moving beyond his very welcome contribution to the current debate on the origins of political institutions, Kreuzer makes also a broader methodological point by stating that “the quality of quantitative research directly depends on the closeness of its dialogue with historical knowledge” (p. 40-41) or, in other words, that employing broad statistical tests (of the kind that fortunately are now common in our discipline) is often not enough to construct and verify most theoretical propositions. As his article puts it, a detailed (historical) analysis of the incentives and strategies of the political actors involved in any outcome of interest has three key virtues. First, it reduces measurement error. Second, it brings us closer to the kind of sound ‘microfoundations’ we need in order to build a plausible theory of outcomes because it ensures that the interests and beliefs we attribute to our agents are not simply assumed but correspond to the latter’s own rendition of those interests and beliefs. Finally, it helps us sort out between observationally equivalent theories. 1 Following Kreuzer’s methodological “plea”, with which I agree, I take this opportunity to examine in more detail the goals and strategies that non-socialist parties espoused toward the electoral system as they faced increasing competition from socialist candidates at the turn of the twentieth century.
1
For similar methodological considerations applied to the exploration of institutional choice, see Rodden (2008).
1
Accordingly, I refine the theory I presented in Boix (1999) in several ways: first, I distinguish between what I call ‘competitive’ electoral markets (in which non-socialist parties competed, at least partly, for similar voters) and segmented electoral arenas (where electoral flows across parties were close to nil); second, I model the preferences of different parties (conservatives, liberals and Christian democrats) toward proportional representation (PR from now on) as a result of their particular position in those electoral markets; and, third, I differentiate between partisan preferences and actual policy outcomes (with the latter resulting from partisan strategic interactions in the context of different constitutions and legislative settings). Once I correct for a few misinterpretations in Kreuzer’s historical rendition, I show that the theoretical explanation I offer (and that still builds on the strategic model of Boix (1999)) matches very well the country-by-country episodes of electoral reform (or non-reform) of the period under analysis. 2 (Notice that in this article I focus on the preferences and policy responses of non-socialist parties. Penadés (2008) has explored the incentives behind the support of socialist parties for PR. I integrate his insights in the statistical analysis I conduct below.)
FROM ELECTORAL STABILITY TO THE ENTRY OF A THIRD PARTY Until the turn of the twentieth century, elections were contested and parliamentary seats were allocated under plurality or majoritarian rules everywhere. Given the coordination properties of those rules (Duverger 1954; Cox 1997), the already established parties had a strong incentive to maintain them. Provided voters exhibit some kind of strategic behavior, non-proportional rules contain internal splits, deter the entry of third parties, and, overall, given dominant parties a strong electoral advantage over any political challengers: the former can appeal to voters’ strategic calculations to maintain their allegiance 2
In Kreuzer’s historical section, nine cases confirm my theory (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States), five partially confirm it (Austria, Finland, France 1919, Germany and Italy) and eight disconfirm it (Denmark, France 1928, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom). I show, however, that except for France 1928 (which in fact belongs to a different category – since it is an episode that results in less proportionality), Greece and Japan, all the other cases fit the theory developed in Boix (1999).
2
while they adjust their policy platforms, if necessary, to preferences shifts in the electorate (due to changing tastes or/and a changing composition in the latter) in order to sustain their share of the vote in the long run. The entry of a viable third party, that is, a party that can contest the elections as a credible alternative and therefore can convince enough voters to move away from the established parties, disrupts that electoral (and institutional) stability. Plurality and majority rules cease protecting the old parties and may in fact contribute in an active manner to the erosion of their dominant status: first, a new (viable) party can equally appeal to the strategic concerns of voters to reinforce its position vis-à-vis the old parties; second, the entry of more parties has strong mechanical distortionary effects on the allocation of seats. 3 Hence, if they are unable to stop the entry of the third party, the old parties should lobby for the introduction of new, more proportional electoral laws. The rise of social democratic parties, due to the interaction of universal or quasi-universal male suffrage with the decision of trade unions, which had been historically allied with liberal candidates, to endorse strictly working-class political platforms, transformed the structure of electoral competition in most advanced democratizing countries: in the late 1870s in Germany (definitely after the SPD was legalized again in 1890); in the 1890s in Belgium, Denmark, New South Wales and Norway; in the 1900s and 1910s in Australia as a whole, Great Britain, France and Sweden (Bartolini 2000, Luebbert 1991, Boix 2007). 4 In turn, that transformation directly pushed electoral reform to the forefront of the political agenda of non-socialist parties (and many socialist parties as well) in all countries except Canada, Greece, Japan and the United States by World War One.
THE STRUCTURE OF ELECTORAL COMPETITION (1): COMPETITIVE MARKETS 3
For a pointed examination of mechanical effects, see Calvo (2009). As discussed in Boix (2007), applying the insights of Kalyvas (1996) on Christian democracy, the union endorsement of social democratic candidates was a necessary condition to coordinate the working class electorate on a third candidate in a context of majoritarian electoral laws.
4
3
The electoral growth of social democracy was a necessary but not sufficient condition to obtain PR. Parties favored PR or not as a function of two conditions, which I sketched in Boix (1999) and now further elaborate upon: first, the type of electoral market in which the old parties competed with each other; second, the extent to which the old parties shared voters with the new party. 5 Broadly speaking, the structure of the non-socialist electoral space ranged from relatively ‘competitive’ or ‘shared’ electoral markets in which most parties contended for at least the same fraction of the electorate to segmented electoral markets where parties received the very loyal vote of a certain social sector and where vote flows across parties were minimal. As I discuss later, although almost all parties ran candidates in both types of constituencies (competitive and non-competitive), one of the two kinds generally prevailed within each party, therefore determining the overall incentives of each party toward PR. Still, whenever those two types of constituencies were equally important to the party and the party was decentralized, parties tended to split internally over PR. To gauge the position of each party in the electoral market, Table 1 reports the average level of geographical concentration of parties (ranging from 0 to 1, with the latter indicating that party i received all its support from a single constituency) in column 4 (columns 1 and 3 list the countries and parties respectively). 6 A higher level of concentration implies a more segment, less competitive electoral market. [Table 1 here]
5
It is worth emphasizing here that their incentives (and capacity) to amend any rules are bound by the response of other actors in the following sense. The governing parties will not approve new electoral laws that distort the existing system of representation to the point of making it “undemocratic” if they have the proper incentives to prefer democracy (Boix 2003). This implies, in turn, that non-ruling parties may, by their organization, strength and actual behavior, restrict, with more or less success, the feasible range of the electoral reform that can be approved by the government or a parliamentary majority. 6 The index of geographical concentration of party i or G is: G = ∑1n v n − p ni 2 * (1 − min(v n )), where n is the number of districts, vi is the share of voters in each district over total number of voters in the country, pin is the share of voters for party i in each district over total voters for party i in the country and min(vn) is the smallest vn across all districts.
4
In a competitive electoral market, the PR preferences of old or established parties were shaped by the extent to which they were dominant in the electoral arena conditional on the entry of third parties. A dominant party was the party that became the focal point around which non-socialist voters eventually coordinated – coordination was indeed feasible because the old partisan electorates had overlapped to some (significant) degree. Under those circumstances, the dominant old party should have rejected (and the non-dominant one should have favored) the introduction of PR in the expectation that it would absorb all or most of the voters of non-dominant old party.
Broad Suffrage and Center-Based Old Parties Dominance is a function of, at least, two things: the party’s position in the policy space and the size of the overall electoral space. To see why assume a one-dimensional space (Left-Right) with two old parties, liberals and conservatives, and a new contestant, the socialist party. Consider first the case in which the franchise is already quite broad (perhaps universal) and liberal and conservative platforms are distributed, with some divergence, around the median voter (of the whole space). (Column 2 in Table 1 displays the percentage of enfranchised men around 1900.) At some point, trade unions shift from endorsing liberal candidates to supporting socialist politicians: former left-wing liberal voters now vote for the latter; the liberal base shrinks; and this decline pushes moderate voters to rally around the conservative platform. Hence, the conservative party is the dominant party and rejects PR. The reverse applies to the liberal party. This story matches the cases of Britain, New Zealand and Britain. After the miners’ unions began endorsing Labour candidates in a few constituencies in the 1900s, the British Liberal party first attempted to amend the plurality system with an alternative vote system: that would have maintained the Liberal lead in the Left camp, allowed Labour to pick some seats, and minimized their joint losses against Conservative candidates in three-cornered fights (Blewett 1972). After World War One, however, with
5
Labour running its own candidates in a majority of electoral constituencies and Liberals split between Asquithians and LloydGeorgians, most Liberal MPs changed their mind and frantically pursued a change in the electoral system – in fact, they supported the first Labour cabinet in 1923-24 conditional on the passage of a PR bill. By contrast, Conservatives opposed any change: in the famous Carlton Hotel meeting of 1922, Conservative MPs voted to abandon a Liberal-Conservative coalition by an overwhelming majority (particularly among those that held safe constituencies) convinced that the existing electoral system would make them the front-runner against Labour in the impeding general election (Butler 1963; Cook 1975; Pugh 1978). In New Zealand, Liberals dominated the political arena until World War One based on a coalition of small farmers and urban workers. In response to the gradual rise of Labour, the Liberal premier, Ward, introduced a two-round majoritarian system in 1908 to reduce the dangers of a split Left vote. Once all socialist platforms joined into the ‘United Labour Party’ in 1912, the Liberal party committed to PR in the 1914 electoral campaign. As in the United Kingdom, the Reform Party’s long tenure in power from 1912 to 1928 made it impossible for Liberals to reform the electoral law and led them, after a gradual process of decline, to merge with the former into the National Party (Milne 1966: 28-48). In Australia, the structure of electoral competition was also one of a broad suffrage with a dominant party blocking any electoral reform – but in that case the identity of the dominant party varied regionally. The Protectionist party outvoted Free Trade (renamed as the Anti-Socialist party in 1906) by a ratio of 3 to 1 in Victoria. In turn, Free Trade votes doubled those of Protectionists in the rest of the country. The rise of Labor eroded the support of both parties – but each one of them became the focal point of non-socialist voters in a different part of Australia. As in the cases of the British and New Zealander Liberal parties, the Australian Protectionist party first floated a system of preferential voting. However, as Labour become stronger, the Anti-Socialists agreed to support the status quo in trade policy, and Radical Protectionist MPs (mostly from Victoria) joined the Labor ranks, fusion among the two nonSocialist parties was swiftly achieved in 1909 with each party withdrawing their candidates in their nonhegemonic states (Overacker 1952; La Nauze 1965; Loveday 1977).
6
Suffrage Expansion and Right-Based Old Parties The identity of the dominant party (and its position toward PR) differed in those countries where the electoral market was competitive but the franchise remained relatively narrow (until the turn of the century). Since the right to vote was based on an income or property requirement, both the voters and liberal and conservative parties were concentrated in the right segment of the electoral space. Accordingly, when the franchise was sharply expanded, the liberal party usually became the dominant party to combat union-endorsed socialist candidates because it was the only one could credibly attract voters to its left – and therefore could attract the strategic vote of conservative voters as well. Under this structure of competition, conservatives should favor PR and liberals should oppose it. That story fits the case of Sweden. Although not completely nationalized in terms of their electoral base, Swedish Liberals and Conservatives used to have partly overlapping electorates, at least in towns and among some agrarian strata (Lewin et al. 1972; Boix 2004). However, because Conservatives were wedded to the old constitutional order, they believed to be at an electorate disadvantage and hence fought for and indeed imposed (with the aid of the upper house, which they controlled) PR as the franchise was sharply broadened from around one third to three fourths of adult males in 1911. Liberals, instead, assuming that the expansion of suffrage rights would work to their benefit, defended the status quo (Verney 1957; Lewin 1988). Half way between Britain and Sweden, Norway fits a similar pattern of strategic behavior. After the proportion of enfranchised men doubled to about 90 percent in 1899 and unions broke away from Liberal candidates, Socialist candidates rapidly controlled urban working-class constituencies (Luebbert 1987). Still, it was only after the Norwegian Labor party increased its share of the national vote from less than 10 percent in 1903 to over 32 percent in 1915, and given that the political antagonisms between the urban and rural areas made a non-socialist coalition impossible, that Liberals accepted PR “not (by) a sense of equalitarian justice but [by] the fear of rapid decline with further Labour
7
advances across the majority threshold” (Rokkan 1970: 158; see also Aardal 2002). Italian Liberals, who had no independent conservative party to their right, also supported PR as a way to minimize the effects of introducing universal male suffrage (which tripled the number of enfranchised men) after World War One. This was particularly true for liberals MPs of Northern and Central Italy, “afraid that with the majority system in force the two mass parties, the Socialists and the ‘Popolari’, would sweep” all the constituencies of those areas (Hermens 1941: 156-7).
SEGMENTED ELECTORAL MARKETS In segmented electoral markets parties’ incentives are shaped by a different set of (more straightforward) constraints than in competitive arenas. Since, by definition, inter-party competition plays a minor role in their electoral strategies, their position toward electoral reform is solely determined by, first, the type of electoral segment each old party caters to and, second, by whether the new entrant threatens their electoral hegemony in that segment or not. At the turn of the century, with socialist parties growing, with the exception of Finland, in industrial working-class constituencies, urban-based traditional parties necessarily pushed for PR to minimize their losses at the parliamentary level. By contrast, rural parties remained supportive of the status quo. Rural parties also preferred non-PR rules for two additional reasons. First, they discouraged ambitious politicians from breaking away from their own party – a more likely occurrence whenever a party enjoys very large majorities. Second, the process of industrialization and the migration to cities intensified the overrepresentation of rural-based parties over time – in Germany, for example, the malapportionment index grew from 7 percent in 1871 to 20 percent in 1912. As theoretically expected, the Belgian, Dutch and German Liberal parties, all of which had their electoral strongholds in cities, were consistently in favor of adopting PR as soon as Social Democratic parties started to make big inroads in working-class constituencies (Hermens 1941; Castairs 1980; Goblet
8
1900; Rustow 1950; Daalder 1990). 7 Similarly, Denmark’s Højre, also urban-based, was frantically in favor of PR after the rise of the social democratic party reduce its share of seats in the Copenhaguen city and province from 71 percent in 1890 to just 25 percent after 1895 (Elklit 2002). In Iceland, urban-based Conservatives also favored PR (Hardarson 2002: 137). By contrast, and in line with the set of incentives sketched before, Venstre, the Danish equivalent to the Liberal party and a farmers’ party, supported the status quo up until the 1915/1920 reforms (Elklit 2002): the growth of social democracy did not affect them directly and the existing majoritarian system allowed them to curb the growth of Radical Venstre, which broke away from Venstre in 1905 and represented urban radical and agricultural laborers (and that maintained an electoral alliance with the socialist party until the full introduction of PR in 1920) (Luebbert 1987). In fact, because its support was concentrated outside Copenhaguen’s metropolitan area, in the first reform of 1915 Venstre accepted introducing PR in that area in exchange for the maintenance of plurality rule in the rest of the country (Elklit 2002). Iceland’s agrarian Progressives (as well as some Conservative MPS from rural areas) were against PR (Hardarson 2002: 137). In Switzerland, the Radicals, who were hegemonic among Protestant urban upper and rural middle strata and therefore well sheltered from the growth of the Socialist party, opposed PR: under the two-round majority system in place they usually won less than half of all votes but over 60 percent of all seats (Lutz 2004). Finally, in France, the secular center parties and the radicals, both of which relied heavily on the French peasantry, resisted the introduction of PR soon after it made its way into parliamentary discussions in 1907 (Buell 1920; Stuart 1920). 8
7
Notice that in Belgium both the Liberal and Catholic parties have a low index of geographical concentration. However, an ecological inference analysis of their inter-election flows reveals that they had extremely stable and loyal electorates (Boix 2004). This puts Belgium into the camp of segmented electoral arenas. 8 In the general election of 1914, proportional representation had become, jointly with foreign policy and military conscription, such a major campaign issue that most candidates took a public position on the issue. A statistical analysis of the position of the elected candidates shows that being an anticlerical Republican or a Radical MP increased the probability of opposing PR by 50 percent. However, that probability declined if their constituencies had a strong Socialist presence or were mostly urban, e.g. no Radical elected in Paris rejected PR.
9
Due to the issues and strategies they employed to mobilize their voters, Christian democratic parties often stood out as a different category from urban and rural parties (Kalyvas 1996). Because of the strong cross-class, cross-sectoral nature of their electorate, their position toward PR varied along with their constituency basis (and their overall geographical distribution in each country). In Belgium and Italy their electoral basis was fairly distributed across the country. In discussions over electoral reform, the Belgian Catholic party split between rural representatives, who benefited substantially from plurality rule, and Brussels parliamentarians, whose seats were directly jeopardized by the formation of a LiberalSocialist cartel. A first proposal (very similar to the Danish solution of 1915) that only introduced PR in urban districts failed to pass. The second and definitive project, imposed by the urban wing of the Belgian Catholic party with the frontal opposition of most rural Catholic MPs, established PR nationally but tailored the size of districts to minimize its effects in rural constituencies: two thirds of all districts had 4 or fewer seats (Goblet 1900; Woeste 1933; Carstairs 1980). In Italy support for the Popular party was thinly spread across the country (mostly because of the recent creation of the party) and there were only local strongholds in the rural districts of Northern and Central Italy: the few Catholic MPs present in the 1913 parliament favored PR (Hermens 1941: 155). In Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland Christian democratic parties were geographically concentrated and relatively unaffected by the growth of socialism in their own constituencies. They should have preferred a majoritarian system. Still, in Switzerland the national Catholic party campaigned for PR in the three referenda of 1900, 1910 and 1918. Its support for PR has to be interpreted as a strategy to dislodge the Radical party, which had controlled the federal government since 1848, from power. However, in several cantons such as Luzern and Fribourg, where the majoritarian system rewarded the Catholic party, the local organization actually campaigned against it (Lutz 2004). Germany’s Zentrum opposed PR until 1913 -- it is possible that its policy shift responded, as in the Swiss case, to an interest in breaking the hold that Liberals and Protestant Conservatives maintained over the imperial institutions. In the Netherlands, the two main Protestant parties, ARP and CHU, were notoriously hurt by the structure of
10
constituencies and their rather dispersed electoral base – their seat share in parliament was about 25 percent lower than their vote share – and this may have contributed to their support for PR.
ASSESSING THE THEORY Table 1 summarizes the previous discussion. Column 5 indicates the vulnerability of each party (either because it can become a focal coordination point in the electoral market or because it is in direct competition with the new entrant in segmented markets). Column 6 then summarizes each party’s position as predicted by the set of variables discussed above. 9 Notice that I have proceeded conservatively by coding any party as favorable to PR only if it was ‘objectively’ vulnerable to a socialist party. Otherwise I do not, even if it had any other strong reasons to support PR such as breaking the hegemony of Liberals in government. This means that in most instances I do not predict (and code) religious parties to favor PR. Column 7 then indicates every party’s public position toward PR. Predictions born out by the evidence are marked in italics. The success rate is very high. Among non-socialist parties, 80 percent of those that should have opposed PR positioned themselves publicly against PR and 100 percent those that benefited from it pushed for its adoption. When we include socialist parties (coded following Penadés (2008)), the success rates are 76 and 100 percent respectively. [Table 2 here] Table 2 checks the robustness of the theoretical model by regressing the position publicly favored by the party on the position predicted by the model. Both measures take the value of 0 (against PR), 1 (party divided over PR) and 2 (in favor of PR). The analysis includes the following control variables: size
9
Finland and Ireland are excluded because their electoral laws were adopted under foreign control (Russia) and at the time of de facto independence respectively. The Irish system was approved by the British parliament in the Government of Ireland Bill of 1920.
11
of the country, party ideology (ranging from 1 for Extreme Left to 7 for Extreme Right), per capita income in 1900, logged value of trade openness in 1913, logged value of population in 1913, and the measures of coordination developed by Cusack et al. (2007) and by Martin and Swank (2008). Table 2 reports two estimations: the first one is based on non-socialist parties; the second one ads socialist parties (following Penadés’ (2008) classification). 10 Party preferences are certainly shaped by the strategic model I elaborated. Whereas the probability that a party harmed by PR would support it is only 16 percent, the probability that a party benefited by PR would lobby for it reaches 99 percent (holding all other variables at their median values). Neither the Cusack-Iversen-Soskice index of coordination nor ethnic fractionalization are statistically significant. 11 Trade is statistically significant and, corroborating Rogowski (1978), positively correlated with the likelihood of preferring PR. Population is significant and, contrary to received wisdom (Dahl and Tufte 1973), it increases the probability of supporting PR. 12
ENACTING PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION The alignment of party preferences, shaped by their strategic concerns, was crucial to determine the fortunes of electoral reform in the advanced world at the turn of the 20th century. However, the actual introduction of PR depended also on each country’s specific constitutional system and, particularly, on both the partisan composition of parliament and actual parliamentary negotiations taking place within each chamber and across chambers.
10
The data set treats countries that never experience a significant socialist party (one getting over 15 percent of the vote) as one data point. For the remaining countries, the data set has two data points: one for the period without a socialist party and one for the period with a socialist party. Results do not change if we exclude the period without a socialist threat in those countries in which socialist parties eventually became a threat. 11 The Martin-Swank index is statistically significant but the coefficient is negative: higher levels of coordination reduce the likelihood of adopting PR. Results are available upon request. 12 The effect of trade is small: moving from the first quartile to the third quartile in trade values in the sample increases the probability of supporting PR by 15 percent. Population has a bigger effect: a similar movement increases the probability by 35 percent.
12
In six countries the pro-PR party (or parties) never had a majority of seats in any of the two houses of parliament: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Accordingly, and with the exception of Switzerland, PR was never enacted. The Swiss parliament was bypassed by a national referendum. But it took Socialists and Catholics three attempts to introduce PR. In the context of a growing Socialist party, and since a parliamentary debate was a constitutional precondition to hold a referendum, the Radical-dominated parliament delayed that debate for almost five years until a general strike in 1918 forced the government to hold a referendum. In France only one of the two chambers had a proportionalist majority. By 1914 most of the members of the Chamber of Deputies supported PR and eventually voted for it after World War One. By contrast, the French Senate, where rural interests were overrepresented, was adamantly opposed to it. 13 The final bill approved in 1919, designed “in theory to give partial satisfaction to the supporters of PR was in practice a rather complicated majority system” (Campbell 1958: 95): it reduced the effective electoral threshold from 35 percent (the threshold under a single-member-district system) to 29 percent; and the disproportionality index actually jumped from an average of 7 percent before the war to 14.5 percent in 1919 and 10.7 percent in 1924. In the remaining countries, PR eventually gathered the support of a majority of legislators (in line with the predictions of the previous section) in both houses. 14 Given the common right-wing bias of the upper house, support in the two houses and electoral reform became automatic whenever the Conservative party (or the Liberal party in Italy and the Netherlands, where there was no separate Conservative party) pushed for PR: in Belgium (where the Catholic party enacted it over the opposition of its rural wing) in 1899; in Denmark in 1915 (with a coalition of Conservatives, who used their dominant
13
The Third Republic’s Senate had 300 members – 65 chosen by the Lower Chamber and the Senate and 225 by an electoral college formed by the delegates of all municipal councils (1 per municipality or about 40,000 electors). The Senate had the same powers of the Chamber of Deputies. 14 In Japan a three-party coalition introduced universal male suffrage and, due to strategic considerations (unrelated, however, to the entry of a socialist party), it replaced single-member districts with a multimember SNTV system in 1925 (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1995).
13
position in the upper house as a bargaining chip, Social Democrats and Radical Venstre); in Italy (where the Liberal party occupied both the right and center of the policy space) in 1919; and in Iceland (where the Conservative party finally allied with the Social Democrats to defeat the Agrarian Progressives) in 1942. In Sweden the Conservative party, short of an absolute majority in the lower house, compensated a few Liberal MPs to vote for PR. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the religious parties “acceded to [PR] because in compensation for PR the Liberals agreed to vote for a solution of the century-old school controversy” (Hermens 1941: 339). 15 The timing of reform in Germany gives further evidence of the role of constitutional decisionmaking rules in explaining the adoption of PR. A broad coalition formed by Liberals, Catholics and Social Democrats, controlling the majority of seats in the Reichstag, favored PR since 1913 (when the Zentrum party embraced it) and committed formally to it as a joint policy at least since 1917. Yet with the Bundesrat or upper house effectively in the hands of Prussia, where Conservatives prevailed electorally, they had to wait till the collapse of Imperial Germany to introduce PR. It was also after the breakdown of Austria-Hungary in October of 1918 that the Austrian provisional assembly, controlled by Catholics and Social Democrats, introduced a PR system two months later (Strong 1939).
CONCLUSION A detailed historical analysis of the interests and choices of political agents at the turn of the twentieth century confirms and enriches the theoretical model I developed in Boix (1999): PR was adopted at the behest of those already established parties that had become electorally vulnerable, conditional on the overall partisan and institutional context in which they made policy.
15
They also did because PR “allowed them to collect their sympathizers throughout the country without the need of complex interparty bargaining” that the ARP, Catholics and CHU had engaged in since the early 1900s (Daalder 1990: 56-58).
14
TABLE 1. ELECTORAL MARKETS AND PARTISAN PREFERENCES TOWARD PR
COUNTRY (1)
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Percent Adult Men Enfranchised in 1900
PARTY
(2)
Over 90
83
(3)
Denmark
France
87
88
Should Party Favor PR? (Predicted Position)
Does Party Favor PR? (Actual position)
(6)
(7)
(5)
0.26
No
No
No
Free Trade
0.42
No
No
No
Liberals
0.11
No
No
No
Protectionists
0.42
Partly
Divided
No
Catholics
0.18
Partly
Divided
German Nation.
0.23
No
Not available
Yes Not available No
0.14
No before 1894 Urban wing yes, after 1894.
No
Catholics
Divided
Divided
No before 1894
No
No
Yes after 1894
Yes
Yes
0.17
Conservatives
n.a.
No
No
No
Liberals
n.a.
No
No
No
Moderate Venstre
0.73
No
No
No
Hojre
0.43
No before 1901
No
No
Yes before 1901
Yes
Yes
Rad Venstre
0.59
No
No
No
Venstre
0.38
No
No
No
Center Center Right Anticlerical Catholic
0.47
Partly
Yes
No
0.78
No
No
Yes
0.73
No
No
Yes
Radicals
0.34
No
No
No
Right
0.92
No
No
Yes
Conservatives
0.70
No
No
No
German Empire
0.85
No
No
No
No before 1890
No
No
Yes after 1890
Yes
Yes
No before 1890
No
No
Yes after 1890
Yes
No
No
Yes Yes after 1913
National Liberals Germany
(4)
91
Over 90
Is Party Vulnerable to Socialist Party?
Antisocialists
Liberals Canada
Index of Geographical Concentration
0.54
94 Progress / Liberal Zentrum
0.49 0.61
Iceland Italy
Japan
Netherlands
28 (90a) 27
ca. 5
51
Conservative
0.15
Urban wing, yes
Divided
Divided
Progressive
0.48
No
No
No
Catholics
0.49
Partly
Yes
Yes
Liberals
0.09
Yes
Yes
Yes
Seiyukai
n.a.
No
No
Yes
Kensekai
n.a.
No
No
Yes
Kakushin
n.a.
No
No
Yes
Seiyū-honō
n.a.
No
No
No
ARP
0.28
No
No
Yes
Catholics
0.39
No
No
Yes
CHU
0.40
No
No
Yes
No before 1913
No
No
Yes after 1913
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
No before 1912
No
No
Yes after 1912
Yes
Yes
No
No
No
No before 1900
No
No
Yes after 1900
Yes
Yes
Yes after 1900
Yes
Yes
Liberals
New Zealand
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
USA
Over 90
90
25
0.26
Conserv./Reform
n.a.
Liberal
n.a.
Conservatives
0.21
Liberals
0.23
Conservatives
0.18
Liberals
0.14
No
No
No No
0.63
No before 1908 Urban wing, yes after 1908
No
Catholics
Divided
Yes
No before 1908
No
No
79
63
90/ chi2 = Pseudo R2 =
17
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